World Health Organization declares Guinea Ebola free

Guinea now enters a 90-day period of enhanced surveillance.

“The coming months will be absolutely critical”, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, a key member of WHO’s Ebola response team.

The WHO said there have been no new cases of Ebola in Guinea for 42 days.

Ebola has orphaned about 6,200 children in Guinea, said Rene Migliani, an official at the national coordination center for the fight against Ebola. More than 2,500 people had died in Guinea from Ebola.

The end of Ebola transmission in Guinea marks an important milestone in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The worst Ebola outbreak started in Guinea about two years ago when the country treated its first patient. In Conakry, the capital, there will be a free concert with music from Youssou N’Dour of Senegal and Tiken Jah Fakoly of the Ivory Coast, along with hundreds of local artists who helped spread the word about Ebola during the epidemic.

Researchers now believe that the first human case in the latest outbreak was an 18-month boy who developed the disease in December 2013 in the remote village of Meliandou, Guinea, near where the borders of the three countries meet. For instance, survivors of Ebola are known to report problems with their vision, and scientists will be studying whether the vision problems and other health issues are linked to Ebola itself or to something else in the community. However, the organization also warned that vigilance would be needed to ensure the disease did not resurface. Survivors must be studied carefully to determine why the virus reappears in some of them; testing suggests it can live on, for example, in the testes, and can re-emerge when someone’s resistance is lowered. The New York Times reported at the time that “workers and officials, blamed by panicked populations for spreading the virus, have been threatened with knives, stones and machetes”. Dr. Mohamed Belhocine, World Health Organization representative in Guinea, said the organization and partners will continue to support Guinea through this period and “in its early efforts to restart and strengthen essential health services throughout 2016”. In the USA, the Obama administration has made significant progress to prepare our country for the next outbreak.

The total number of children who lost one or both parents to Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – the three most affected countries – exceeded 22,000, UNICEF added. A key proposal is the creation within the World Health Organization of a unified disease outbreak response centre with “clear responsibility, adequate capacity and strong lines of accountability”.

Ms Wellesley-Cole said one of the difficulties she and other workers encountered fighting the Ebola virus was differentiating it from other diseases such as malaria.